This week rackAID staff hit the” Parallels 2010 Summit in Miami Beach. The rain dampened the temptation to skip the conference though we did manage to escape on evening for dinner. Though these events can be tiring, you come back with a lot of ideas. Rick Warren, GoDaddy’s President, poked fun of “cloud computing” craze by interviewing people on the street who had no idea what cloud computing meant.

Here’s a brief recap.

Why Go?
I often get asked this question because we are not a hosting company. “Jeff, why are you guys here you don’t do shared hosting.” That’s true but many of our clients do. Also many of our partners and vendors are at the events and you never know what opportunity may pop up.

Who’d you Meet?
While Juli Z was busy in various sessions, I spend most of my time developing new partnerships or cultivating old ones. Here’s a run down of some developments:

Jeff Huckaby (rackAID) and David Wartel (R1Soft)

SoftLayer has Ears
I like these guys because they listen. I try to catch them 2-3 times a year, especially when new products and services roll out. We managed an increasing number of servers in their facility, so we like to know what is in the pipeline, what infrastructure improvements have been made, and what we can do to better work together. For example, SoftLayer just introduced Citrix XenServer Essentials. This is great because we will be rolling out managed XenServer solutions in about a month and a key sticking point was licensing concerns. SoftLayer also announced that they will be opening a new data center in California. The exact date is not set, but as soon as they do we will have new capabilities in that market, which will be good for jumping off to Asia.

Citrix XenServer
Had a brief meeting with some people from Citrix. Citrix XenServer is a virtualization technology that can be very attractive to anyone who needs:

• development platform
• high availability
• scalability
• load balancing
• portability

Our staff is finalizing their training and we will be offering managed Citrix solutions within a couple of weeks.

Web developers should take note as we plan on having a LAMP-in-a-Box setup where you get a development system, production system and database all contained on one physical host. This setup will be easy to scale out and reduces the costs of maintaining multiple physical servers.

R1Soft CDP
rackAID will be teaming up with R1Soft on some webinars regarding backup and recovery solutions. I had a good chat with R1Soft’s founder Dave Wartell regarding the upcoming 3.0 release which includes major improvements in disk IO and data protection.

Parallels
While we do not support their entire product line, I was pleased to have one of their guys reach out to us. We took advantage of their new certification program and will become one of the first companies to have Plesk certification. This allows us to by-pass level 1 support and get access to their engineers more quickly.

Too many too count
Over the two days, I met with many other companies. SSL providers, shopping card providers, email and network security as well as other server providers. Overall it was a good conference. If you use Plesk or other Parallels products, I recommend you try to make it to Plesk Summit 2011.